Established in 1969, Manohar is a publishing house and a bookseller serving individuals and libraries. We export books by mail and have a bookstore at Ansari Road in Delhi.
Manohar initially sold only rare and out of print publications, but soon branched out into local sale/export of new books published in India, and then into publishing of scholarly works under its own imprint.

22 August, 2012

This
Book is an attempt to collate Indian perspectives on the multifaceted themes
and sectors of China-Pakistan strategic cooperation.

China-Pakistan
ties have been a major obsession amongst Indian opinion and policy-makers.
However, this obsession remains restricted to China’s transfers of sensitive
technologies while the essential backdrop that has sustained such a unique
‘axis’ has never been explored with sufficient rigour. Especially, given the
secrecy that shrouds these transfers of missiles and nuclear material,
technologies and know-how, occasional outbursts in Indian media remains
vulnerable to political populism, emotional outrage and to calculated Western
media leaks. These trigger flashes of interest but no substantive follow up
debates or dedicated research for evolving India’s policy options. It is this
essential gap that this volume tries to fill and generate a serious debate on
contours and implications of China–Pakistan relations.

The
project locates itself primarily in the new context where the events following
9/11 and the growing India–China and India–Pakistan understanding seems to
undermine China–Pakistan axis and looks forward to future challenges. In
addition to providing a wealth of information and analysis on this subject of
critical importance, this volume aims at shedding populism and bursting several
myths that continue to surround Indian debates on China–Pakistan strategic
cooperation.

Swaran
Singh
is Associate Professor, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University (New Delhi) and an Academic Consultant with Cente de Sciences
Humaines
(New Delhi). He can be reached at ssingh@mail.jnu.ac.in

Child Spacing
and Reproductive Health in Rural Karnataka, India : From Research to Action

By-
Inge Hutter, N.V. Rajeswari, J.S. Hallad and B.M. Ramesh

While
quite a lot is known about child spacing and survival chances of children, much
less is known about child spacing and women’s health.

The
book describes child spacing behaviour of women in rural Karnataka, South
India, as embedded in the economic and socio-cultural context in which women
live. Adopting a life course perspective, child spacing is related to other
events in the reproductive career (first menstruation, marriage) and reproductive health issues such as sexuality
and contraceptive use. Women marry early, have their children and then often
opt for sterilization. Modern spacing methods are hardly used: women think they
have negative effects on their health status which is already low. Women
indicate that the most important health problems for women in the villages are
related to pregnancy and delivery, white discharge and general weakness.
Different cultural schemas can be identified, i.e. those of heating (ushna,
kaavu) and cooling (tampu) and pollution and purity, motivating
reproductive health behaviour such as during menstruation, the use of the oral
pill, the treatment of white discharge. Since young married women are fully
dependent upon their husband’s family, the role of the mother-in-law becomes
quite important. While men are thought by women to have an important influence
on their reproductive health behaviour, men turn out to have hardly any
knowledge about these reproductive health issues.

The
research has provided evidence for the formulation of a health educational
campaign, called Spandana, which is a collaboration of the researchers with
FPAI Dharwad. The
translation of research into action is also described in this very timely
volume.

Inge
Hutter,
demographer and anthropologist, is Professor of Demography at the Population
Research Centre, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Since the 1990s she
has conducted research on Indian reproductive health issues.

N.Y.
Rajeswari,
demographer, was Research Officer at J.S.S. Institute of Economic Research,
Dharwad, at time of the research. Now she works at the Indian Institute of
Health and Family Welfare, Hyderabad.

Jyothi
S. Hallad,
a postgraduate in child development, is Research Assistant at the J.S.S.
Institute of Economic Research, Dharwad, Kamataka, since 1996. She conducts
research on reproductive health issues.

B.M.
Ramesh,
demographer and psychologist, was Director of IER at time of the present
research. Currently he is Director Monitoring and Evaluation, Karnataka Health
Promotion Trust, Bangalore.

Bhakti
in Current Research, 2001-2003: Proceedings
of the Ninth International Conference on Early Devotional Literature in New Indo-Aryan Languages, Heidelberg,
23-26 July 2003

By-
Monika Horstmann (ed)

The
present volume forms the ninth in a series of proceedings of the triennial
International Conference on Early Devotional Literature in New Indo-Aryan
Languages which was held in Heidelberg, Germany in 2003. The conference covered
a wide range of topics relating to the Bhakti tradition. The volume unites
twenty contributions which reflect original research carried out by their
authors in the period between 2001 and 2003.

For
all their diversity, not a few of the articles bring to mind that the term Bhakti
is a locus where various concepts and often composite religious identities
meet. As the focus of the
conference was on the northern vernacular traditions, with no Sanskrit and
little Dravidian material being discussed, the contributions represent facets
of a broad South Asian religious and literary complex, of which Indic and
Islamicate traditions as well as a whole gamut of literary languages is
consitutive.

The
contributions address literary genres and historiography, manuscriptology,
painting, hagiography, various sects, musical practice as related to Bhakti
authors and sects, and the interface of Yoga and the Indic and Islamicate
traditions, respectively.

An
indispensable volume for scholars of South Asian religion and culture.

Monika
Horstmann (Boehm-Tettelbach) is a retired professor of Modern South
Asian Studies at the South Asia Institute, Universtiy of Heidelberg, Germany.

Rescuing the
Future: Bequeathed Misperceptions in
International Relations

By-
Jagat S. Mehta

The
book arose out of the outrage expressed by Senator D.P. Moynihan at the
author’s statement that the ‘Cold War was the greatest intellectual failure of
history’. In a reaction, Prof. Stephen Cohen renewed his suggestion to compile
the author’s occasional writings. Stephen Cohen made the selection and grouped
them into the following five parts: ‘With Nehru’, ‘The Cold War and its
Shadow’, ‘Fresh Water Diplomacy’, ‘Diplomacy between Unequal and Equal
Neighbours’ and ‘Looking Ahead’.

On
the express suggestion of J.N. Dixit, the volume also includes a letter the
author wrote on his book War and Peace on India’s relations with
Pakistan. The three-part essay on Non-proliferation was written at different
times, but the last one after the US Congress approved the Bush-Singh Agreement
on Civil Nuclear Cooperation.

What
binds these essays, written over twenty-five years, is that the consequence of
technological gallop was not contemporaneously comprehended. Big countries and
small aggravated the handicaps for two-thirds of mankind by their
misperceptions. The author argues that in a nuclear world, professional
diplomacy demands a more consistent adherence to the vision of a socially just
and peaceful world. The old arrogance of size and conventional or nuclear military
superiority has lost the old coercive capability. In the twenty-first century,
democracy and transparent accountability has to supplement traditional means of
security.

Jagat
S. Mehta
was Foreign Secretary, Government of India, during 1976-9 appointed at a
comparative young age of 53.

After
retirement, his primary interest has been in voluntarism for social and
economic development. However he has woven these with spells in academia. He
was an Associate at Harvard Centre for International Affairs in 1980, Fellow at
Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington in 1981 and appointed Tom Slick
Distinguished Professor of World Peace at Austin (Texas) in 1983. His
predecessor in this chair included Nobel Laureates Gunnar and Alva Myrdal.

Reconstructing
Identities: Tribes, Agro-pastoralists
and Environment in Western India

By-
Nandini Sinha Kapur

This
monograph brings together essays on the marginal and elite social groups from
early medieval times to the colonial period. It looks at tribal and
agro-pastoral groups in Gujarat and Rajasthan such as the Bhils, Meenas and
Bishnois in interactions with rural societies
and their participation in the processes of state formation; their changing
identities and self-
perceptions, control of natural resources, environmental changes in the context
of forests, agricultural expansion and water resources.

Tribe-societal-state
interactions meant long drawn-out negotiatins involving alliances and
conflicts leading to gradual marginalization of tribal groups as limited
‘peasantization’ and ‘integration’ went on. As a result, marginal communities
reconstructed identities, made shifts in self-perceptions through adaptations
from the Rajput/Brahmanical world and contested histories with ruling elite in
the late medieval and early colonial times.

The
case studies of southern Rajasthan reveal that construction of water works in
Jaisalmer area and control over environmental resources helped rural and ruling
elite in maintaining a distinction for themselves in both early and late
medieval times. On the other hand, common folk of the Thar desert, the Bishnoi
agro-pastoralists carved out a special niche for themselves as
‘Conservationists’ by preaching a popular religion and socio-economic ethos of
preserving the natural resources in an ecology of ‘uncertainty’.

Nandini
Sinha Kapur
is Reader in History at PGDAV College, University of Delhi and has been
associated with the postgraduate teaching of Ancient Indian History in
University of Delhi. A former Homi Bhabha Fellow and a recipient of fellowships
in India and abroad, she has published widely both nationally and internationally.

This volume brings together new research by
Indian and German scholars on Mahima Dharma of Orissa. It combines
anthropological insights, historical research and textual analyses to offer a
wide variety of perspectives on this popular yet relatively unknown religion:
perspectives which have taken shape in field experience in Orissa and research
in Germany.

Starting with an essay by Anncharlott Eschmann,
whose pioneering work in the last century had kindled academic interest in the
Dharma, this book blends current investigations of
different hues and textures in order to provide a nuanced and detailed account
of this
multi-dimensional religious order in the different phases of its
evolution.

Apart from diverse assessments of the life and
works of the radical poet Bhima Bhoi, it also include translations from his
important works of Bhima Bhoi and Biswanath Baba, crucial records of the
archives and unpublished letters and photos of Eschmann. Needless to say, this
volume will cater to a readership interested in the anthropology, sociology,
philosophy and history of religions but also to people who are attached to the
land of Orissa, its rich culture and the Dharma itself.

Ishita Banerjee-Dube is Professor at the Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio
de Mexico, Mexico City.

Johannes Beltz is Curator of Indian art at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich,
Switzerland. In addition he teaches Hinduism and Buddhism at the University of
Orissa; Religion; India;

Pied Pipers in
North-East India: Bamboo-Flowers,
Rat-famine and the Politics of Philanthropy
(1881-2007)

By-
Sajal Nag

This
book is about an amazing ecological phenomenon known as bamboo flowering.
The hill state of Mizoram (India) is covered by a thick growth of two
particular species of bamboo which flower and fruit approximately every fifty
and thirty years. The bamboo fruits which are a delicacy for the wild rats
induce excessive breeding in them. Once these millions of hungry rats finish
eating the fruits, they invade human habitat and devour their harvest causing extreme
food scarcity leading to famine. In the recorded history of Mizo hills, this
calamity is knows to have occurred in 1737, 1767, 1827, 1861, 1881, 1911, 1931,
1959, 1977 and the predicted famine of 2007 is already ravaging the hills.

Earlier
the British used this calamity to subdue the valiant Mizos, Christian
Missionaries to engage in the politics of humanitarianism and the Mizos
themselves to whip up nationalist sentiments. The 1959 famine is particularly
remembered as it sparked off the 20-year
long insurgency in Mizoram. The post-colonial government both at the state and
centre are currently engaged in an interesting competition of philanthropy to
mitigate the current
famine. This book narrates the politics of colonial, evangelical, nationalist
and post-colonial state around an environmental catastrophe.

Sajal
Nag
teaches Modern and Contemporary History in Assam Central University, Silchar.
A Commonwealth Fellow, he is an acknowledged authroity on the tribal encounter
with
colonialism, politics of nationalism in general and north-east India in
particular.

Periphery and
Centre: Studies in Orissan History,
Religion and Anthropology

By- Georg
Pfeffer (ed.)

Studies
in Orissan Society, Culture and History Series 7

The
second Orissa Research Project presents the eastern province as a multi-centred
cultural
complex. In an interdisciplinary effort this historical study covers the
so-called iron-age in western Orissa and questions the established foundation
date of one of the major coastal temples. Conditions of early colonialism are
exemplified by a report on a typical road construction, just as popular protest
movements of that phase, as well as the ambivalent position of their leaders
and the issue of conversions to Christianity are examined.

The
critical Orissan politico-religious controversies over independence are
presented by the visions of the Maharaja of Parlakimedi. Indological
contributions indicate that the contemporary debate on ‘animal sacrifice’ has a
long history. Just as the popular religious movements against Brahmanism,
introduced here by two accounts of rather different peasant and tribal versions
of the Orissan Mahima Dharma religion, are a contemporary manifestation of
similar dissent in the past.

The
empirical anthropological studies reflect the rather unique concepts of illness
among the Rona, the category of the person, as created by the application of
sacrificial food among the Gadaba, and the AghriÁ ideas on death. These three
articles may lead to the first comprehensive monographs on these important
communities of the tribal zone. The issue of a tribal status is ambiguous,
since the principals themselves, as well as external observers, tend to join
questions of administrative advantages with status ascription in acephalous
political systems and the implications of plough cultivation. Postcolonial
‘modernization’, as described in another article on a new power plant in the
tribal area, looks at how it has completely excluded the indigenous people.
Finally questions of anthropological method are raised in articles on Kondh
social structure, on the Goddess in southern Orissa, and on the question of
values in different social contexts.

Georg
Pfeffer
is Professor of Socio-Cultural Anthropology (Ethnologie) at the Free
University of Berlin.

People of the
Jangal: Reformulating Identities and
Adapations in Crisis

By-
Marine Carrin and Harald Tambs-Lyche (eds.)

Globalization
processes link centres of power and culture all over the world. But these are
surrounded by peripheries, whose integration in the global paradigm is neither
an inevitable nor an automatic process, as a naïve perception might lead us to
believe. In South Asia, such peripheries seem a long way from the
cosmopolitanism of Bomaby or Bangalore, and the crisis is hardly the same to
the ecologist statesman and the herdsman looking for pasture. Societies in the
South Asian wilderness—jangal—are closely tied to the environment but
peripheral to systems of power. For them, the landscape is symbolically
charged, and the meaning with which natural and social surroundings are
invested tends to produce an identification as against others, expressed in
terms of ethnicity. Changes at the symbolic level imply a danger of losing
identity.

The
peripheral groups studied in this volume are the Santals, the Rona, the Bondo,
the Pengs of Orissa, the Jadopatias of Bengal, the Kulava of Kerala and the
Todas of Nilgiri among others.

It
is in the periphery that confrontations between development projects,
conservation efforts, and local populations are most marked. The contributors
deal with various peripheries, faced with intrusion by more powerful groups, as
well as by environmental crisis. But the responses are various, as the authors
of this volume show.

Marine
Carrin
is Director of Research, CNRS at the LISST, Centre of Anthropology, Toulouse,
France. She has worked for many years on the Santals and is currently working
on the bhuta cults and other aspects of religion and society in South Canara,
India.

Harald
Tambs-Lyche
is professor of social anthropology at the University of Picardie—Jules Verne,
Amiens, France. He is currently working on a monograph on the Gauda Saraswat
Brahmins of South Canara, India.

Of Fibre and Loom: The Indian Tradition, is the product
of collaborative work between a designer-weaver and an ethno-historian. It is
through this joint research that the full range and depth of the textile
tradition of the subcontinent is brought to view. Their mastery over the tools
of technology and the discipline of ethno-history has created a synergy, which
has
allowed the development of a unique focus in the investigations highlighting
little known facts relating to the shaping of Indian sensibility.

The
fibres covered include all varieties of silk, cotton in different counts, bast
fibres such as ramie and jute as also animal fibres such as goat hair, camel
hair and wool. The book begins with an exploration of the different kinds of
looms, weaving mechanisms, the technology and processes involved before and
after weaving, found in India. It then proceeds to trace the gradual
refinements effected in loom technology, emphasizing the changes that were
brought about in the weaves, weave structure and pattern.

The
book also provides a detailed analysis of the products of the loom against a
historical background of the various types of clothing and clothing accessories
worn by men and women. The work closely knits the connections between loom
technology, the variety of fibres used, the end product and the end user. This
approach is bound to excite the interest both of ethnographers as well as
textile historians. The loom is analysed as a croos-cultural artefact.

This
necessarily leads to an examination of the correlations in the interfacings between
ecology, language and culture. From the wool weaving traditions of Kashmir,
Kullu and Kinnaur to the Deccan horizons of Kanchipuram silks and from the Paithani
repertoire to the Jamdani woven on the Yongkham loom of Manipur,
this book is encyclopaedic in range. Illustrated with over 300 original
photographs and line drawings of the loom and products, the book constitues a
unique study and is the only one of its kind so far published. Apart from its
appeal to academia, the work will also prove useful to the trade, drawing the
attention of the exportr no less than the collector.

Lotika
Varadarajan
is an art and cultural historian and author of international repute with a
varied background, all of which finds expression in her current work. Having
spent her early years imbibing tribal culture in Assam, she pursued her higher
studies at the Universities of Delhi and Bombay, Chulalongkorn University,
Bangkok and Newnham College, University of Cambridge, UK. She has been
associated with the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and National
Institute of Science Technolog and Development Studies (NISTADS), New Delhi.
Widely travelled both within the country and outside, she has
number of articles and books to her credit.

Design
Consultant and design educator, Krishna Amin-Patel is an alumnus of the
National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, India. Having specialised in
Textile Design, she joined and served as a full-time faculty member at NID from
1980-1999. As a design consultant, she has an enviable record of having been a
member of creative design teams, led them and worked in areas of designing for
the Indian market as well as for export. Currently residing in the USA, she has
completed her Master of Fine Arts from the Arizona State University in 2002.
She has in addition been a member of many important committees and visiting
faculty at the Nottingham Polytechnic, UK, at Rhode Island School of Design,
Penland School of Crafts, USA.

After its annexation in 1849, the Punjab became the most important stragegic and agricultural province of British India. Within a few decades, much changed in the region, including the intellectural horizons of the Punjabi elite. The monograph tells the comparative socio-intellectual history of the Singh Sabha (Sikh), Arya Samaj (Hindu) and Ahmadiyah (Muslim) voluntary reform movements.

As a new contribution to the field, the term ‘moral languages’ is introduced to discuss the reformers’ redefined traditions that emerged in response to Western reason and Christianity. Underwriting the Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyah moral languages was the fundamental process of strengthening doctrine, conduct, and ritual through a dialogic process in which readings of the traditional literature (often as interpreted by European Orientalist scholars) were combined with an understanding that frequently invoked the authority of science.

In particular this volume argues that the secular-religious binary opposition, which has been so dominantly in existence since the European Enlightenment, hides more than it shows.
Significant to the social consciousness of the Punjabi reformers was the partial overlap with the British civilizing mission’s underlying notion of improvement. The term moral languages
emphasizes that since the nineteenth-century religion is nothing more than morality motivated and spread through modern institutions and practices. Hence, the Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyah moral languages are discussed in term of modern traditions based on rational knowledge and practices that became vital to the struggle for authority and status in the context of an emergent liberal public sphere and processes of state formation.

This timely book will be of great interest to scholars of British Punjab, South Asian colonial history and comparative religion.

Bob van der Linden (Ph.D., Amsterdam University, 2004) is a modern South Asia historian. He has recently published on the relationship between music and empire in Britain and
India.

Kannada,
one of the major languages of the Dravidian family, is spoken by over 40
million people, mainly in the state of Karnataka, South India, where it is the
official language. It is one of the twenty-two languages recognized by the
Indian Constitution. It has a rich literary tradtion going back to the ninth
century, and exhibits a complex pattern of sociolinguistic and stylistic
variation, marked, in part, by a thorough assimilation of Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit,
Prakrit. Hindi-Urdu, etc.) and more recently, English elements.

The
present descriptive grammar gives a detailed and sophisticated account of the
standard language, drawing on the insights of traditional structuralist, and
generative linguists, and on the author’s own extensive research. Keeping the
needs of both the theoretician and the descriptivist in mind, the work gives a
lucid explicit and in many cases original account of
the major and minor structures of the language in syntax, morphology, and
phonology.
A valuable feature of this grammar is the author’s consistent attempt to relate
formal and functional aspects of the language. Although the variety described
is the standard literary variety (because of its greater morphological
transparency), the forms of the colloquial
varieties are continuously referred to, and the examples convey the flavour of
spoken idiomatic Kannada. With its descriptive rigour, range of phenomena
covered, wealth of examples,
and ethnographic insights, this volume is the most current, comprehensive, and
authoritative description of modern Kannada to date.

The
book will interest students and researchers in the areas of linguistic theory,
descriptive linguistics, language typology, comparative/contrastive
linguistics, language contact and convergence, and South Asian linguistics as
well as translation and Kannada language and literary studies.

S.N.
Sridhar
is Professor of Linguistics and India Studies and Director of the Center for
India Studies at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He has also
served as Founding Chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies
at the State University of New York. Stony Brook. He received B.A. (Honors) and
M.A. degrees in English Literature and Linguistics from Bangalore University
and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Professor
Sridhar has conducted extensive research in bilingualism (language contact and
convergence), sociolinguistics (code-switching, code-mixing, language
modernization, language spread), second language acquisition in non-native
settings, structure and functions of India English and other World English’s,
teaching English as a second language, descriptive
linguistics (reference grammar of Kannada), theoretical linguistics (syntax of
dative subjects, morphology of agglutination, level ordering, productivity),
psycholinguistics (cross-linguistic experimental study of cognitive universals
of sentence production), applied linguistics
(scope and relation to linguistic theory), and history of linguistics (contributions
of the Indian grammatical tradition to linguistic theory).